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Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

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Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#221

Post by bckr »

DannyBee wrote: post #189
lucubratory wrote: post #98

Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can't even get…

The thing is - there is a totally easy and simple mechanism to create early-stage believability. Take a video of you producing and testing it, with a mobile phone. It only works 10% of the time? Not an issue, post 10 videos. Whatever. Would it be perfect? No, of course it could be faked. But i guaranteed people would be a ton less skeptical and willing to push hard on this if the original authors had done this sort o…

People are plenty motivated, it only came out a few days ago and there’s a replication attempt.

As others have pointed out the idea of using video as strong evidence is underbaked.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#222

Post by lolinder »

guerrilla wrote: post #190
michaelt wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of that. But if I was an early-career researcher looking to establish myself, secure funding and maybe a tenure-track position, and I had a nobel-prize-winning discovery up my sleeve, I can't imagine many things that would take precedence. I mean, obviously whatever happened happened. It just seems strange to simultaneously claim to have discovered something 24 years ago, and to have been rushed into publis…

> It just seems strange to simultaneously claim to have discovered something 24 years ago, and to have been rushed into publishing prematurely. They had to get other jobs to survive. Somone else forced their hand with the publication. There's nothing incosistent about that.

There was no one who would be willing to fund their research into a room temperature semiconductor? Even though they had a sample that passed the basic tests?

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#223

Post by erlich »

shireboy wrote: post #213

A little bit of a rabbit trail, but with this and similar science/reporting issues, I find myself wishing both the hype and the vitriol was taken out completely. What if the world could follow the LK-99 team and replication attempts in near real time and everyone had a sense like "if this succeeds, great, if not, we know one more way it doesn't work". And what if the millions of various studies on any topic were publ…

It's amazing we don't have good personal content filtering yet. I would pay so much for an all-encompassing blocker.

There is so much content I would block if I actually could. Completely disable YouTube Shorts on mobile. All snarky/sarcastic/political/ad-hominem takes filtered.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#225

Post by OJFord »

dmvdoug wrote: post #106
lucubratory wrote: post #98

Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can't even get…

Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little…

> But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little bit to get the feeling back may have somehow made your small molecule production have less binding affinity or something.

That wasn't my experience, in either high school physics or undergrad electronics. I hated keeping a lab book (just wanted to 'do' & see results I suppose) but the emphasis was always on recording as much as possible to understand what's important and what happened etc. when you review later.

I suppose looking through another lens you can call that an expectation of repeatability, but it's just a matter of emphasis isn't it? You know it might be hard to repeat, so you record as much as possible about the setup & process to remove variables and control what needs to be controlled (especially if you don't yet understand what that is, or the full scope).

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#226

Post by sterlind »

dmvdoug wrote: post #106
lucubratory wrote: post #98

Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can't even get…

Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little…

FOGBANK, the classified styrofoam-like material used as a filler in US thermonuclear warheads, had a similar issue. They needed to restart production, but the new samples didn't work! It turns out an impurity present in the original batch was critical. Once they reproduced that impurity, the material acted correctly.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#227

Post by carabiner »

whimsicalism wrote: post #219
redm wrote: post #207

Seems there is new support that its legit! https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1686215574177841152 National Lab (LBNL) results support LK-99 as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. Simulations published 1 hour ago on arxiv support LK-99 as the holy grail of modern material science and applied physics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892

I worked in this field and imo these preliminary DFT results do not actually mean that much. I do not believe the comments on that other thread are from other practitioners given how confident in this DFT results they seem, when DFT is notoriously unreliable especially when funky correlated things might be going on.

Yes CMTC has said that this preprint changes nothing. The author's mic drop gif is a bit... premature.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#228

Post by dcow »

p-e-w wrote: post #67
XorNot wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're claiming you have a room temperature superconductor, it would be more suspicious if you weren't claiming that. Because if LK99 works, then that's exactly what it is. It'll be material of the century.

Look at some of the most ground-breaking research papers in the history of science, such as the Watson/Crick DNA structure papers. They literally discovered the core of life itself, which is infinitely more important than a room-temperature superconductor. Yet they are incredibly modest about it, and don't waste a single sentence waxing philosophical about what all this means etc. In a similar vein, Andrew Wiles anno…

And the unsanctioned paper is titled: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. And the response paper is titled: Superconductor Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and mechanism.

Notably not “We’re fucking changing history”. What are you griping about? That the paper admits that this would be a significant finding with wide-ranging applications? Because that’s true…

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#229

Post by fnands »

whimsicalism wrote: post #219
redm wrote: post #207

Seems there is new support that its legit! https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1686215574177841152 National Lab (LBNL) results support LK-99 as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. Simulations published 1 hour ago on arxiv support LK-99 as the holy grail of modern material science and applied physics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892

I worked in this field and imo these preliminary DFT results do not actually mean that much. I do not believe the comments on that other thread are from other practitioners given how confident in this DFT results they seem, when DFT is notoriously unreliable especially when funky correlated things might be going on.

Yeah, I would class it as encouraging, but far from definitive. But at least it shows that there might be some theoretical basis to it.

It might be useful (as jboggan mentioned in another thread) in explaining why reproduction could be difficult; it seems to be a finicky material to create.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#230

Post by whimsicalism »

fnands wrote: post #229
whimsicalism wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in this field and imo these preliminary DFT results do not actually mean that much. I do not believe the comments on that other thread are from other practitioners given how confident in this DFT results they seem, when DFT is notoriously unreliable especially when funky correlated things might be going on.

Yeah, I would class it as encouraging, but far from definitive. But at least it shows that there might be some theoretical basis to it. It might be useful (as jboggan mentioned in another thread) in explaining why reproduction could be difficult; it seems to be a finicky material to create.

Oh yes, I also don’t think this reproduction failure is a strong signal either. It is super finicky usually in practice
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